SOC-1031

Knowing in Sociology
PART II

Week 6

Information

Aims

  1. Sociologists are humans
  2. Science and art
  3. An information science
  4. Method is theory is method

Being human

Being human

Being human

Being human

Being human

  • Are we human, or are we denser?
  • Are we human, or are we dancer?
  • I guess it bothers people that it’s not grammatically correct, but I think I’m allowed to do whatever I want (Killers’ frontman)
  • Apparently, alludes to a quote from journalist Hunter S. Thompson about how America is raising a generation of dancers, afraid to take one step out of line (link)
  • Salsa dancing? (Luker 2008)


Sociology as art

What kind of art?

Literature? Performative? Martial?

It is my deeply held conviction that the very best social science research of the coming era will be exactly this kind of research—research that draws on the kinds of bold and interdisciplinary insights you can get when you salsa-dance. But be warned: you can’t just show up at a salsa dancing palace and expect to have as much fun as you should without having done at least a little training ahead of time. For all its improvisational nature, salsa dancing builds on some very specific steps (Luker 2008, 2)

Sociology as science

Sociology has to be understood as a population science, primarily on account of the degree of variability evident in human social life, at the level of sociocultural entities, but also, and crucially, at the individual level – this latter variability being inadequately treated within the holistic paradigm of inquiry, for long prevalent in sociology but now increasingly called into question (Goldthorpe 2016, 17)

  • An information science?

References

Goldthorpe, John H. 2016. Sociology as a Population Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luker, Kristin. 2008. Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: Research in an Age of Info-glut. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.